


with your bare hands, with love,

by Legendaerie



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Chorus Trilogy (Red vs. Blue), F/M, Identity Issues, M/M, Mercenaries, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicidal Thoughts, about 60/40 YC to WT, hey war sucks like a lot
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-08
Updated: 2019-04-07
Packaged: 2019-11-13 16:30:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18035144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Legendaerie/pseuds/Legendaerie
Summary: Some people don’t know how to stay dead.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> it is my BIRTHDAY and I’m going to post something if it KILLS ME
> 
> Long time coming Chorus AU That I’ve teased on tumblr some ghastly number of months ago. is “york fucked up and feels bad about it” a topic I’ve already beaten into the ground? yes. am I going to continue to do so? _ab-so-fucking-lutely and I’m taking everyone in here down with me_.

The emptiness in him isn’t from the loss of Delta. But when Texas took his AI from his injured body, promising him he’d be safer without it, it was like opening a door to the vacuum of space. What had started with the crash of the Mother of Invention, what had been held at bay by a support network of friends who all turned on each other, consumed him alive.

 

And now, years later, York has found himself here.

 

His armor is nothing special, nothing flashy. Matte black and refurbished, less protection than he’s used to but it blends in with the rest of the merc squads he’s been bouncing between for years. Currently he’s running with Eclipse, a thin silver crescent on his helmet running oddly parallel to his scar, as part of their vanguard squad.

 

“You don’t dress like a front lines man,” says one of his coworkers, Mantis, kicking him in the shin as she sits across from him in the cramped back of the cargo ship. The rest of them have been chatting for some time now, and he’s been content to watch them in silence. “Why the light armor, Spectre?”

 

Spectre, née York, tilts his head back and stares at her through his visor. “I can move faster in it,” he says.

 

“Die faster, too.”

 

He grins, letting it show through the helmet in the way his head lolls to one side. “Been there, done that. It’s not as bad as you think it is.”

 

“Dying?” she asks, then snorts and shakes her head. “Crazy old bastard. If you die, who’s gonna spend your paycheck?”

 

Agent York would have been disgusted with the idea of killing for profit with no regard to the morals involved. Spectre knows that’s what the Project was doing for years. A lecture on there being more important things to fight for would fall on deaf ears, so:

 

“Get paid more for being front lines than sniping.”

 

Mantis snorts and nuzzles the barrel of her gun. “Guess we’ll just see who gets more kills.”

 

York turns away, content to let the subject drop. Mantis starts talking to someone else after a moment, theorizing about what kind of planet they could be dropped on as part of this assignment. Their pay is good and that’s enough for most, but some of the younger members want to know about the culture, the scenery; if there’s space ports or spas or anything worth seeing.

 

“Few old alien obelisks or something,” says Fenrir from two seats to York’s right: as head of the unit, in addition to the crescent moon design his visor is blue tinted with silver detailing to make it look like snarling fangs. “Nothing worth anything to the average man.”

 

“What about to the above average man?” asks someone else from down the line, puffing up his chest.

 

“If there was one in the back of this ship, I’d tell him,” Fenrir notes dryly, and the team echoes a chorus of boos like a pack of wolves.

 

They’re not friends. York knows them because it’s ingrained in him to learn, to care, and he can’t not pick up on their names and habits. But it’s a one way street, half from the nature of most of those who kill for money and half because York can’t afford to let them. There were never bounties out for the Freelancers, not officially, but more than a few Eclipse member have been rejects or escapees from the UNSC. He can’t take a risk. Better to be alive and ignored than dead and friendly. Better Spectre than York.

 

Still. When Mantis kicks him for attention again, he gives it to her.

 

“I’ve seen you in hand to hand a couple times. You’re good, but you could be a whole lot better.”

 

“Gee, thanks,” he drawls.

 

“What I mean is,” and she leans forward, resting the long barrel of her gun against her shoulder, “I’m gonna watch your six while you’re out there. And you better put on a show.”

 

York cocks an eyebrow. “Will you shoot me if I don’t?”

 

“Maybe.” She raises her helmet enough to give him a wink - she’s cute, all dark eyes and pale skin and a charming nose, but there’s nothing inside him that rises to meet her obvious flirt. Nothing but a starless night, an empty infinity, and York can’t think of anything witty to say so he says nothing.

 

Mantis pulls her helmet back down and moves on.

 

——

 

York becomes Spectre the moment his boots land on the ground; blocking out that last twisted shred of himself that howls in agony when he shoots someone without knowing who they are or what they did. In the Project, at least they were told something about who they were up against. Here, he’s only told his wages and what color armor are the ones he has to kill.

 

They go down easy. That makes it worse.

 

Fenrir leads the charge and they blow through the mismatched ranks of the two native factions, scattering their formation like a bowling ball through pins. They’re paid by the fatality, and Spectre’s number slowly ticks its way to double digits.

 

Kill number twelve raises her hands and gasps a “no!” and Spectre’s finger freezes on the trigger. Her voice is so frightened, so young it jolts him out of his numb state.

 

He pulls the trigger, barrel of the gun jerking sideways at the last second. York raises his helmet just enough to clear his mouth and leans over her cowering body.

 

“Wait a couple minutes. Then go. I’m sorry.”

 

With a theatrical sneer, he spits on her body, straightens, and keeps going. Fenrir is watching him, and York refuses to turn and face him.

 

He hears a scramble of movement behind him, then a gunshot and the thud of a dropped body.

 

“Missed one,” Fenrir says, passing him at a jog again, and Spectre follows. 

 

He doesn’t hesitate the next time, or the next, or the next. The going gets harder as they press deeper in, members of his squad picked off by snipers before they regroup and change tactics. Mantis and her team join the fight, giving them cover fire, and once again the Eclipse mercenaries press their way forward through the line.

 

And then someone in aqua armor comes through like a hurricane and the tide shifts completely.

 

They’re fast; to an untrained eye it might have looked like armor enhancement but Spectre can tell it’s training. Their moves are elegant, effective, and shut down all progress to a longer distance stalemate.

 

His shotgun isn’t as useful at this range, so Spectre switches to a pistol. A small clip but a high caliber, and he’s modified his helmet to help him aim. If he’d still had Delta, he could have taken down a soldier with every shot, but as it is he hits about as many as he misses and a couple are fatal. Never the newcomer, though. Must be an elite.

 

Spectre ducks down behind cover, reloading his pistol, and tunes out the celebratory chorus of the native army until a name catches his attention and steals the breath from his lungs.

 

“—Carolina—“

 

York goes absolutely still, mind scrambling to replay the words surrounding the name. Her name, not the place but the person, the woman who took his heart to the grave he put her in. With urgent, shaking fingers, he tries to tune into the short wave radio of the other side.

 

There’s not much for a while, just other chatter. Then someone asks for orders and he hears the tinny voice of an AI over the airwaves.

 

“ _ What do you think, C? How do you wanna play this? _ ” He doesn’t know if he’s heard that voice before, not for certain, but it makes the empty implant at the base of his skull itch. He doesn’t dwell on it for long, every sense honed for the next moment heavy with possibility.

 

“I think,” she says, in  _ her _ voice, in the voice of a Carolina he hasn’t heard since long before the ship crashed into that world of ice and bone, “we can clear them out before we fall back.”

 

“ _ You and I? _ ”

 

“Yeah.”

 

They say something else, but York is deaf to it all as he stands, slowly, from behind cover.  _ Say something. You rehearsed this. _

 

From across the battlefield, he sees the narrowed amber gaze of the aqua-tinted elite turn to face him. Spectre raises his hand, amazed that it doesn’t shake. Further amazed when it actually halts the action.

 

_ Say something. _

 

“Spectre? What are you doing?” Mantis asks him, her voice pitched up in alarm. He doesn’t answer, his vocal cords paralyzed and his feet moving of his own accord to the no mans land between the two armies. The elite tilts her head, watching him.

 

_ Say something. _

 

Spectre unloads his pistol and tosses it to the side. Shotgun, too.

 

“Get back here,” Fenrir warns, all gravel and gunmetal, and he knows he’s going to get a bullet in the back but  _ she  _ speaks again.

 

“You doesn’t look like much of a champion,” she calls across the field to him, “but I accept. Winner lets the losers retreat?”

 

_ Say something. _

 

He nods. Fenrir snarls in perfect time with Mantis’s muttered string of threats and curses. And with an easy step marked only by a slight, subtle limp, Agent Carolina crosses no man’s land to meet him.

 

In his head, he’s practiced this moment a hundred times. She’s at a bar, a space station, a billion places. She smiles at him, she shoots at him, she plunges Connecticut’s knife into his chest and twists the blade. But in all of those scenarios, he said something first.

 

_ I’m sorry. _

 

Spectre waits for her to make the first move and blocks her kick with a twist. Her next blow is more cautious, and he rolls with the impact, rising to give her a countering block she blocks as well.

 

_ I love you. _

 

She catches his kick and tries to dislocate his knee, but he leans back to support his weight on his hands and nails her in the thigh with his other leg. A grunt of pain from a newly-healed injury, and he’s able to twist free. Not without price, though. He’s wrenched the muscle in his hip and bites his lip through the ache.

 

_ I’m sorry, I still love you. _

 

They’re getting faster now, more careless; trying to break through the other’s defenses. Spectre knows he’s outmatched but he’s stalling for time, trying so hard to break through his own guilt and shame and fear and scars and just open up to each other like they used to. But this, too, was their way of communicating once. All the words have changed but the language is there, the melody under the moves.

 

“Who are you?” she asks, a note of something dark and dangerous in her voice.

 

_ I’m sorry I didn’t love you enough to take you with me. _

 

He feels the opportunity the same moment she does, a moment after a missed punch that leaves his body wide open. She takes it like he knew she would, slamming him onto his back on the earth so hard he feels her knock the wind out of him. Spectre gasps underneath her, the words finally in his mouth but all of the air out of his body and struggling to breathe.

 

“ _ And stay down, _ ” he hears the AI crow as Carolina holds the dull edge of a knife against his throat. His black gloved, shaking hands clasp her forearms, holding her to him.

 

_ Don’t leave me again. _

 

She hesitates, the knife steady in her hand and her body immobilized under her. “Who  _ are _ you?” she asks again.

 

“Got her,” says Mantis, and time freezes.

 

Spectre’s senses flood with a multitude of things all at once. He feels the sting of an AI in the port of the back of his mind, hears the shot ring out and watches it blow through Carolina’s helmet; then events roll backwards in slow motion.

 

“ _ Who are you?”  _ asks a voice he hasn’t heard in almost as long, and he feels the air fill his lungs like fire.

 

With a strangled cry, York flips their positions, covering Carolina with his body, and as the sniper round tears through the armor in his back they keep rolling until he’s flung off her. His head tips towards her, and he watches her wipe blood off on her thigh before he realizes that it’s his.

 

Spectre presses a hand to the side of his neck, listening to the cacophony of voices on all sides screaming “traitor!” in answer to the question he couldn’t resolve, until the world slowly slips away to leave him in the dark.

 

————-

 

It takes a couple hours before the battlefield dies down: the black-clad mercenaries and their mismatched allies rallied enough to put up a good fight before they were once more pushed back and forced to retreat. It’s only now, as Carolina sinks into an exhausted kneel, that she lets her mind go back to the stranger she’d fought one-on-one.

 

They left the bodies of their comrades on the battlefield. It didn’t surprise her, but she didn’t really think about it either until she’s watching members of the Chorus General Army carry the matte-black bodies off their field on stretchers. The dead on their side are mourned and loaded up for last rites back home, while the bodies of fallen mercenaries are stripped for gear and burned. It’s not much of a funeral, but better than letting them rot.

 

The smell is awful. It’s testament to the grief of the Army, of the lack of experience, that so many have their helmets off to wipe away tears. Carolina remains stoic inside her helmet, numb to the sight of the aftermath of war, as she looks to see how she can help.

 

A black helmet with a white crescent over the left side jogs her memory.

 

“Epsilon?” she asks softly, careful not to let anyone else hear her. Chorus has had enough losses, enough pain today for her to be caught fixating on a mercenary who nearly baited her into getting sniped.

 

“ _ Yeah _ ?”

 

“I was thinking. That guy… the one we fought on no man’s land. I feel like he—”

 

“ _ Knew us? Me too. _ ” He lives in her head, it shouldn’t surprise her that he can guess her thoughts. “ _ He had an AI port. I felt it right before he got shot. Coulda been in the Project or something. _ ”

 

“An AI port,” she echoes. Across the way, a truck loaded up with mismatched and piecemeal mercenary bodies rumbles along, headed for the pyre a little ways up the road. Her heart drops into her boots.

 

“ _ If you get close enough, I‘d be able to find the port again.” _

 

She uses the speed unit, vaulting over a Chorus soldier bent over a wound, and flags the truck down. From up close, it’s worse; the flies have started collecting, on wounds and mouths and eyes.

 

A flash of blue, zipping over the stack of bodies like a gnat. “ _ Not in here.” _

 

Carolina looks up the road to the column of smoke building from the growing pyre.

 

“ _ If it was in there, the port’s too far damaged for me to find,” _ Epsilon warns.

 

“Then let’s keep looking here.” No sense in following that trail of thought until they’ve exhausted all their options.

 

Scouting the battlefield takes longer than she wanted. At every turn she’s faced with someone else who needs her, young soldiers struggling to lift their dead comrade’s body from a ditch, someone still too shellshocked to stand on their own, and even in the scant hours between their standoff the terrain has been torn apart by ballistics. They need her. But she might need this.

 

At last, Epsilon finds someone.

 

“ _ Over here!”  _ He hovers over the body a mere twenty feet away, his helmet tilted in such a way to hide the distinct silver sliver on the wide visor. His hand is on his shoulder as though clutching at something, and he’s incredibly still. 

 

“Is he alive?”

 

“ _ I think so.” _

 

“You think?” Carolina bushes the Eclipse merc with her boot. What had they called him? Spectrum? “Can’t you check?”

 

“ _ Oh, yeah, lemme just jump into his brain and see if he’s still alive,”  _ he retorts. “ _ No. I’m not doing that until I find out who this guy is. What if he’s Florida?” _

 

“You didn’t know Florida.”

 

Epsilon sputters. “ _ Well, a couple of the other guys did, and you did, and Blue Team did so I know enough to—“ _

 

“Shut up,” Carolina says, and kneels down to pop the seals on his helmet.

 

If she’d let herself think about it, she would have waited. She would have paid attention to the scab crusting on his neck, would have remembered how she’s cut him deep there during their fight and noticed how the ground around him is black with dried blood. But she does none of these things, and she pulls off the helmet with little care and no gravity.

 

A man’s head, streaks of white in his brown hair like shards of moonlight and a scar like cracks in ice across one closed eye, thuds against the muddy earth. It can’t be. Washington said— Texas said—

 

“Epsilon?” and her voice cracks on his name, fear and doubt chilling her to the bone.

 

“ _ I see it too. I…”  _ For once, he seems lost for words.

 

York is laying on the scorched earth under her knees, and everything falls into place hours too late. How well he countered some of her old favorite moves, how quickly he had learned her new ones. 

 

Carolina fumbles with the release on her own helmet, lifts it just enough to clear her mouth and leans in close; hunting for the faint stir of his breath on her cheek. She doesn’t know how’d she’d react if she could feel it. If she can feel anything, when she’s numb to the bone like this.

 

“ _ He’s got vital signs in his HUD,” _ Epsilon informs her. “ _ Flesh and blood, so not a cyborg. Think he’s a clone?” _

 

“He isn’t special enough to clone.”

 

“ _ He was to you.” _

 

That sparks something in her. “You didn’t know him,” she says, blinking quickly and pulling her helmet back on. 

 

“ _ I know  _ **_you_ ** _.” _

 

The wound on his neck has opened up again and is seeping into the mud, a visceral hourglass oozing out the seconds. Carolina places her hands on his neck, thinking about how easy she could kill him here, finish the job and never have to think about the Project again. Be a new woman. Find a new name.

 

Her hands shake. More blood weeps out, seeping into her gloves. She presses her fingers into the torn Kevlar and steels herself.

 

“We need to keep him alive. For questioning.”

 

Epsilon radios help, but she doesn’t make out the words. She’s probably in the middle of a panic attack, by the feel of it; the rush down her spine, how she feels hot and cold and also nothing at all, chunks of time flaking out of her until she’s losing track of how long she’s been here, straddling a man she once loved, trying to choke the life back into it.

 

“It’s not working,” she snarls, feeling the blood ebbing against her fingers.

 

“ _ Then let me try something. I’m going in.” _

 

_ “ _ Try someth—?”

 

He’s gone before she can finish the thought, the silence deafening like tinnitus. Alone, Carolina tries to read the man’s vitals, as if somehow it will tell her it’s not York, and he isn’t dying. As if it will tell her if she should feel relief over the idea of one less Freelancer. One less loose end. One less gun. One more ghost.

 

“Not like this,” she whispers. “Not here.”

 

Nobody answers.


	2. Chapter 2

Epsilon expected a world of darkness. Instead, he enters one of white.

 

After a moment of processing — downloading — his eyes adjust to a landscape of snow. A sharp cliff, a distant horizon tinged peach in the early twilight. Shadows of powder blue and lavender. A man in gold, standing on the edge. Epsilon’s fury spurs him on, storms him across the silent snow intent on grabbing him by the chest piece and either shaking answers out of him or shoving him over the edge.

 

A woman's voice stops him. “She fell, York. No one can reach her down here.”

 

Whatever sort of heart Epsilon has stops. He freezes, caught in that aching vulnerability that comes after the fires of rage are put out, leaving a seared, oozing, weeping wound.

 

“Tex?” he asks, and not for the first time he wishes he had a body that would let him cry. Neither of them seem to hear him. 

 

This isn’t a dream. It’s a memory. Here, in the world of the past, York doesn’t turn from the precipice to answer. “She’d go down that cliff for _me_. No one left behind.”

 

“No, she wouldn’t.” Texas takes a step forward, her hand held out in offering. She’s so close; Epsilon reaches out but her hand goes right through his without stopping. He doesn’t belong in this scene. He wasn’t here.

 

“Not who she is right now,” she continues. “That Carolina wouldn’t wait for you.”

 

“You don’t know her. And maybe I don’t either, but—“

 

He clutches something in his fist.

 

“I can’t _leave_ her.”

 

“We have to go. Now. They’ll catch us. They’ll imprison us. _Torture_ us.” Her voice distorts on the word, a mechanical echo of a dozen screaming voices. “Please.”

 

York turns and stares at her hand. Epsilon watches his head tilt up and meet her gaze through their visors, watches him read the expression somewhere buried in there. Watches York realize the truth of it and almost, almost take her hand.

 

Then the memory splits, and a crack splits across the ice between them like chain lighting. York's mind, falling to pieces. His time running out.

 

“I can’t,” York says. “I’m so, so sorry.”

 

Texas vanishes, everything vanishes, and the precipice behind them is steep as an elevator shaft and the sky is stained red. Another step backwards, another, and Epsilon has to make a choice; lunge for York as the risk of both their lives or give up.

 

There’s only one answer.

 

_“Stop!”_

 

Epsilon grabs York’s wrist just as one foot goes over the edge. Snow billows over his boots as he’s dragged forward by the dead weight, and he digs in his heels.

 

“You _can’t_ ,” he begs York. “She’s not down there anymore. Nothing is.”

 

York can’t seem to tear his eyes away from the abyss. “It’s what I deserve,” he says, sounding years older - the real York now. “For what I did.”

 

The snow crumbles from under them, and they sink slowly into thick, cold darkness.

 

Epsilon has never been inside someone’s brain as their mind fell apart, but Theta has - and recognizes the feeling. Outside, York is real, and he’s dying.

 

 _Give him something to live for,_ Theta urges.

 

“Listen,” Epsilon says. “I know what it’s like to— to lose someone.”

 

He tries to close his eyes against the snowy landscape but he can’t - pictures another cliff, another time. Pictures another woman lifted in the air by a man in hulking white armor, but this one was stabbed in the face by a metal spike and he can still see the way her body seized as she died.

 

“I know. But the answer isn’t to lose yourself.”

 

The snow is turning to ice around them, weighing them down in this sluggish, numb infinity. He can feel the electrical signals in York’s brain faltering, sapping Epsilon of his strength and leaving him to pilot parts of the body. Tell the heart to keep beating, even with so little blood left.

 

“Please,” he chokes. “Come back with me. You can’t give up.”

 

York’s helmet turns, slowly, exhausted to face him.

 

“Don’t leave us again,” Epsilon begs, in all of his fragmented voices, and tries for one last pull.

 

* * *

 

 

York jolts awake with a gasp. He’s in a medical bay, stripped to his undersuit and strapped to the table. No helmet. No weapon. No escape. Panic, left over from whatever dissolving nightmare shocked him to his senses, is bleeding fast into emptiness. He’s been tortured before and is already numbing himself to the idea of it when something flickers in the back of his mind.

 

He isn’t alone in his body.

 

“ _Oh, god, my head,”_ moans an AI inside his skull. “ _The head I don’t have but still somehow hurts.”_

 

This might be worse. Torture he can handle. Something like this, with access to his memories, his body? There is no defense against that. York shifts in his bonds, searching the room for something to free himself with. Just one hand, and then maybe he can—

 

“ _Whoa, shit, you’re awake too! Thank god.”_ A tiny blue hologram of a man in armor shimmers into his line of sight. “ _Did, uh, all of you make it back?”_

 

“Back from what?” York rasps, throat dry and tight. He swallows and only then realizes how much it hurts to do that. Right. The cut.

 

At the same time, he feels the AI remember _her_ too.

 

“ _Oh, fuck, I’ve been in you this whole time. C is gonna kill me.”_

 

“Carolina,” he breathes, his heart pounding. She’s alive. He’d almost forgotten, almost written it off as another dream. Sometimes the good ones were worse than the nightmares, but that— that was real, wasn’t it?

 

“ _Oh.”_ The AI stops, and York can feel it flipping through the rush of memories he brought to the surface. Too late for him to snatch them back from this prying presence. _Ohhhhh wow. I didn’t know— I mean I knew, because I knew everything, but— you really still—“_

 

“Stop.” York’s mind scrambles for the override command Delta had taught him once, the last failsafe against the Meta. A loaded gun his partner had handed him in the wake of what tore Maine to pieces in its quest to become whole. “Admin Password Lone— lone star— _lonestarofdavid_. Stop reading my memories.”

 

Immediately, the sensation stops. Everything stops. He can feel the AI tense with paranoia inside him, feel the slow turn of every single process in it switch to fear, then rage.

 

“ _How the_ **_fucking hell_ ** _did you do that?”_

 

Blood trickles down his nose. “I’m not answering any more of your questions.”

 

“Oh, but I haven’t even started with those!” comes a woman’s cheerful voice. York whips his head so fast trying to get her in his line of sight he hurts his neck; she’s in the purple and white armor of one of the native factions. Enemy armor. Carolina’s side.

 

She approaches him with a bounce to her step, leaning into his personal space and he knows with a kind of dull certainty that she’s a torture specialist. There’s a type.

 

“For starters, how are you feeling?” she asks, all saccharine and scalpels, and York puts on his best charming grin.

 

The AI beats him into speaking. “ _Well enough to admin override me,”_ it spits.

 

“Oh my. You _are_ special, aren’t you?”

 

“Why thank you,” he starts, a feeble attempt at the cavalier guile he once wore as comfortable and constant as his golden armor. “Most women only pick that up on the second date.”

 

She leans over him closer, until he can see his reflection in the tiny purple square of her visor. He looks terrible, salt and pepper stubble and eyes sunken from exhaustion, complemented by the splash of red dripping down to the seam of his lips.

 

“You killed a lot of my friends, you know,” she whispers.

 

There’s nothing witty he can say in the face of that truth. He lets his face fall blank, building up the walls he needs to survive whatever hell she’s about to put him through.

 

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs back.

 

He didn’t mean it. Or he does, from the bottom of his empty heart, but he didn’t mean to voice it. The woman above him doesn’t move.

 

“Hmm.”

 

Movement on the far side of the room catches York’s eye - he doesn’t break the violet glass stare until his brain recognizes the color of that armor, and then he can’t not look. Heart in his throat and heavy on his tongue, York clamps his jaw shut and just looks at her.

 

Carolina has taken her helmet off, and she’s aged a bit too. Subtle lines in her face, a couple new scars, a messy braid draped over her shoulder. His fingers itch to fix it, muscle memory still fresh on hours of doing just that and crowing afterwards how he’s better at braiding than she is.

 

He doesn’t say anything. But his face always said too much.

 

“Hm,” the woman above him hums again; too late, he remembers her presence and spares her only the briefest look. She’s already withdrawing, standing politely beside his table. “Hi, Carolina. Sleeping Beauty finally woke up.”

 

“ _Hey, C.”_ The AI must be hers, the one he heard earlier. He can feel it’s guilt, it’s shyness and shame and lingering distrust for York. “ _How long were we out?”_

 

“Days.” She’s looking at York with an inscrutable expression, mouth a firm line like a sniper rifle’s barrel.

 

“His heart stopped quite a few times,” says the woman in white, tilting her helmet to face them. “If you hadn’t been there, Epsilon, our patient probably would have died.”

 

Epsilon. Agent Washington’s AI. One from the Project, related to Delta and Theta and—

 

_“Took you long enough.”_

 

York retorts in a whisper, bitter with regret. “I thought you were going to torture me.”

 

_“Hey, from what I saw in there, you probably would have liked it.”_

 

 _“_ Epsilon,” Carolina snaps, and both man and AI give her their full attention. “Doctor Grey. If he’s stable, we’re leaving.”

 

The violent, violet woman gives a thumbs up. Inside his head, York feels the AI prepare for a jump. “ _Yeah. Yeah, okay.”_

 

He’s gone, rending the migraine in York’s head bad enough tears spring to his eyes. The feeling of loss tears something open inside York, less of a bandage off a healed wound and more of a scab off an infected one. “Carolina, wait—“

 

“No.” She holds up a hand, and once again he shuts up. “Not— not right now. Later.”

 

Later.

 

York plays the word over and over in his mind, sealing it to memory as she walks away. Later. She’ll see him later.

 

After years of feeling like it was never, later is the sweetest word on his tongue.

 

“So it is true, then?” asks the doctor, jolting him out of his thoughts.

 

“I— what?”

 

“You were lovers?”

 

York steals a look at the woman next to him. Carolina’s already well out of earshot, but he wants to whisper anyway.

 

“What answer doesn’t have you torture me?” he asks.

 

As expected, she laughs. It’s a pretty sound. “Any of them! Or none of them. Kimball hasn’t decided what to do with you yet, so I think a teensy bit of torture is still on the table.”

 

York licks the blood off his lips and stares back at the closed door.

 

“Do you _need_ me to answer?” he asks.

 

“... no. You know, you’re very odd. A lot of times, when you spend years wearing a helmet, your face forgets to show emotions and makes your body do all the work expressing everything.”

 

He gets where she’s going with this. He was never good at poker. “Not me, though.”

 

“Nope!”

 

York closes his eyes and leans back against the pillows. “If you’re going to torture me, you might wanna start with the face. There’s still a couple molars I haven’t had pulled yet. Maybe that would fix me.”

 

“Ooooh, you’re a funny guy, aren’t you?” Another peak of silver laughter. “I hope we get to keep you. And all of your teeth.”

 

He shares a soft smile, but doesn’t relax until Grey leaves to tend to some unknown, droning machine on the other side of the room.

 

_Later._

 

He clings to those two syllables that promise a tomorrow, any tomorrow at all, with desperation; one again on the edge of a cliff and he holds on to _later, later, later,_ until he sinks into an exhausted sleep.

 

* * *

 

 

“ _t’s him.”_

 

“We did DNA tests while he was out.” Carolina is pacing in her room, helmet still in hand. “Could be a clone.”

 

“ _They can’t clone memories.”_

 

“What about you?”

 

Epsilon splutters. “ _Listen, he’d have to be some kind of flesh cyborg to pull that off and that’s too complicated. Even for us and all our weird shit. It’s him. I can feel it. Delta can feel it.”_

 

“It’s not the same Delta.”

 

“ _Well, not really, but it’s a copy of— Damn it, do you **want** me to say it isn’t him?” _

 

Carolina presses her forehead against the visor of the helmet in her gloved hands. “I don’t know! Maybe! It’s complicated.”

 

“ _Obviously.”_

 

If she knew what she wanted, things would be easier. York was a memory for so long, something she’d round a corner in a hall to find waiting for her with a smile. This one, this Spectre, wears a worn out copy of his face and can’t match the man in her dreams. Those eyes, though, bright and burning like stars. If only she’d never taken his helmet off and seen what remained of her lover, her friend, her loyal traitorous second whose heart was too big not to beat for others. Whose heart she had broken. Whose heart she thought stopped years ago.

 

“You in there?” a man asks.

 

“Shut up,” she snaps, blinking rapidly. But it was Washington’s voice, not Epsilon’s, and she opens the door to let him in.

 

“Hey. Did you go to the Med Bay yet?” He’s tense. Angry, a little scared. Carolina envies the simplicity of his emotion.

 

“Yes. I saw him.”

 

He stares at her. “... that’s it?”

 

“What?”

 

“Nothing!” He raises his hands, taking a step back. “I just didn’t expect you to have— left him in there.”

 

“I was never big on bedside vigils, Wash,” she says, then regrets ever having brought it up. Carolina can’t remember the touch of York’s hand on hers anymore. “I’ll deal with it. Don’t let anyone else talk to him until we’re sure it’s him.”

 

“And if it is?”

 

Carolina slams the door on him, throwing her helmet at it for good measure, and slumps down onto the bed. Outside, she hears Washington sigh then retreat, leaving her to her thoughts. They’re not good ones.

 

They still have a war to fight, and York was on the wrong side of it. If he’s valuable, they may have to use him as a bartering chip or kill him themselves.

 

 _“Hey, hey, C,”_ Epsilon starts, “ _it’s not gonna be like that. C’mon. I’m the one who is supposed to think up all the worst scenarios.”_

 

“What if it is, though?”

 

“ _Then we stop it.”_ Epsilon materializes in front of her. “ _Carolina, we’re the ones giving orders now. This isn’t like it was in the Project where we were powerless to stop our friends from killing each other. Where we were told to kill them ourselves. We can find another way.”_

 

“I hope you’re right,” and she watches him shimmer into visibility on her knee. Epsilon has never felt like her father, even after she knew who created him. Not much like her mother either. A brother, maybe.

 

“ _’m always right,”_ he crows, and at very least he’s definitely a Church.

 

Maybe more than she is right now.

 

A few minutes later, she gets a message from Kimball and heads back out again, helmet firmly in place. She’s alone in what serves as her office now. The loss of Doyle weighs heavy on them still, and ever the turn of her head when Carolina enters seems slow.

 

“How are you?” she starts.

 

“Don’t ask me that again,” Carolina grits, standing to stiff attention without even thinking. “What is it?”

 

Kimball studies her, then holds up a data pad she’s been reading. “Results came back. Not a clone.”

 

Carolina swallows.

 

“So. What do you wanna do with him?”

 

“What do _you_ wanna do?” Carolina deflects.

 

“Strip him down to an undershirt and tie him to a flagpole for target practice,” Kimball starts, then slumps deeper into her chair. “But it’s not his fault, is it. None of this is. It’s just business to them. That’s why it hurts so much. We’re just numbers to them. And this is our _home.”_

 

Kimball buries her face in her hands. Too late, Carolina wonders if she should have asked _Kimball_ if she was okay.

 

“He’s a Freelancer, right?” She asks, composing herself with a little shake of her head. “Can we trust him?”

 

“Yes. I— maybe.” Carolina gives her head a little shake and starts again. “He _was_ a Freelancer. One of the best.” Her heart beats faster at that admission, and she hates it. “Not very good at deception.”

 

“ _He took a bullet for her,”_ Epsilon adds. “ _On the battlefield when they were dueling. Their sniper had a bead on her, and he took it. I think we can use him.”_

 

Carolina stiffens. She hadn’t known that. “That’s— jumping to conclusions.”

 

“ _Hey, I didn’t say we could tell him our secrets, but we could probably get him to be a meat shield again if you bat your eyes enough.”_

 

Her pulse increases again, this time from rage. “I will _not ‘bat my eyes’_ at _anyone,_ especially not—“

 

“Please. Enough.” Kimball waves her hand. “We’re not using him for anything right now. We have enough to handle for the time being. So long as you think we can hold on to him, he can wait.”

 

 _Later_ , Carolina thinks, remembering her promise.

 

“One of the mid security cells should hold him.”

 

Kimball nods. That easily, Agent York is set aside.

 

“So. Our next skirmish is probably going to be over the gully to the southeast of Mahrim…”


End file.
